“His historical place had already been cemented as a figure of the New Journalism. He had been doing projects where he immersed himself, becoming very involved with his subjects and part of their culture in order to photograph them from the inside. He has the ability to engage people in a way that allows them to be themselves in front of the camera.”

“This work is also a break in terms of technique. Many are done with 35mm camera but a number of the architectural photographs required use of a view camera, which he had never used before – so it was a learning experience. It is slow, carefully considered, calculated shot and it causes a different way of thinking. He has avoided all the clichés of architectural photography, and part of it may have been that he wasn’t trained in that so he was approaching it with a fresh eye.”

Yet progress is not always benevolent or beneficial; for every gain, there is an equal and opposite loss – a sensibility Lyon knew, as underscored by his eerily prescient title. The photographs are a eulogy of sorts, a tribute to a city built by hand that no longer exists.

“Lyon shows us the neighbourhood, warts and all. There’s a poignancy to that that helps to create a sense of intimacy. The sheer beauty of the photographs and the stately elegance to the composition slows you down and gets you to look and gets you involved in them,” Tannenbaum notes.

“The city that is no longer there is being preserved through these photographs. They tell you that this is something that was important, valued, and loved – even with the peeling paint and rusting cast iron façade. It is a story where you not only have a hero but you know that you have a tragic ending and it makes you value it all the more.”

This generation born in war, born in the jail cells of the South, born at the Pentagon march, watches in disbelief as the country is paved over, malls replacing corn fields, synthetic food replacing corn, cash replacing value. What has become of us? Is the country brain dead? Is this what we have done with our freedom? Our greatest surviving value is greed. Is that what our legacy will be? What shall we tell the children?

The 16mm Films of Danny Lyon, preserved as high resolution scans

After his ground breaking work as a photojournalist in the 1960’s, Danny Lyon turned to films, making a series of non-fiction films in the 1970’s and 1980’s. With the recent recognition of the 2016 de Young/Whitney retrospective, funds were provided to preserve these remarkable 16mm films. High resolution digital scans were made from the original A&B negative rolls under the close supervision of the artist. The DVD covers themselves, first made for VHS tapes, have been recognized for their power and realism, and are on display at the San Francisco Museum of Art show which opened November 3rd, 2016.

These are great digital copies of some of the best non-fiction films of the seventies and eighties, exclusively available from Bleak Beauty.

The entire body of Danny Lyon 16mm film work can also be streamed on Vimeo. The sixties meets the twenty first century.View Bleak Beauty Films